


like apples and oysters

by syllogismos



Category: Burnt (2015)
Genre: Addiction, Developing Relationship, M/M, Sharing a Bed, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 14:10:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllogismos/pseuds/syllogismos
Summary: Cooking itself is the art of surrender. The work of it is true hard labor: sweat, aching joints, sometimes blood. The fruits of it are beautiful, carefully asymmetrically arranged on spotless porcelain. But the fruits of it are for someoneelseto enjoy.The best chef in the world is the one who can put everything he’s got into a dish and then hand it off at the pass and not even think to look after it. The best chef in the world surrenders.





	like apples and oysters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rivestra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivestra/gifts).



> The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell. (Zora Neale Hurston)

* * *

When Adam starts at Jean-Luc’s—no one ever calls it by its name, it’s always just _Jean-Luc’s_ —Reece has a little one-room flat around the corner from Le Saint-Sauveur, convenient for stumbling home to, drunk, and not for much else. There isn’t even a closet. The kitchen, if you’d dare call it that, is a galley kitchen on the same wall where the door from the minuscule landing at the top of five floors of spiral staircase opens. The door opens, in fact, with just a centimeter of clearance from the dull olive-colored fridge that needs to be pulled away from the wall and have the ice melted from its compressors with a hair dryer once a month.

Next to the fridge is the sink, and next to that a sliver of worktop, with the hob in the corner. The rest of the space is an unbroken, slightly squashed square; the loo and the bathroom are behind doors on the inside wall. It’s not much, but it’s enough for sleeping and scrambling eggs occasionally for a quick 2 a.m. “dinner” or for breakfast on a rare day off.

Reece wakes because the morning light is streaming in directly across the double mattress on the floor. The light falls in two thick stripes, matching the narrow pair of windows on the northeast-facing wall. Reece is on his back on the left side of the mattress, his outside foot threatening to drop off the side. Adam is taking up the bulk of the space, sprawled on his stomach. They are both still wearing their clothes from the night before, and Reece has a hazy memory of stumbling home drunk on too much absinthe and cheap brandy and of failing to turn Adam away.

Most people look younger asleep and more innocent, but not Adam. There’s a faint crease in his brow, and he’s clutching the pillow—Reece’s _only_ pillow—under his head like he’s afraid someone’s going to take it from him. No one knows much about Adam’s background, but he arrived penniless in Paris, nineteen years old and rail-thin. He put on at least twenty pounds within the first few months, and that said something. He hadn’t been skinny before because of a high metabolism. The fact that a kid who’d likely been scrounging (or stealing) for scraps on the streets came to Paris to cook in a Michelin-star restaurant strikes Reece as slightly odd, but if there’s one thing that his own first couple of years in a real kitchen have taught him, it’s that the cooking life takes all kinds.

It won’t do to get caught watching Adam sleep, so Reece gets out of bed and showers the grime of the bar off. Adam’s still fast asleep when Reece is dressed and ready for breakfast. He hesitates a moment, but only that long: Adam is not a guest and certainly not a lover, and if he’s woken by Reece’s breakfast preparations that’s just too bad for him.

Adam wakes when Reece is moving eggs from the pan to two slices of buttered toast. He groans, first, then sits bolt upright.

“What time’s it?” he asks.

“Eleven fifteen,” Reece answers, “I’ve made eggs on toast and coffee.”

“Can’t–“ Adam says, and he’s up already, checking his pockets for his wallet and keys, sniffing under one armpit and making a face. “Can I borrow a clean T-shirt?”

“Second drawer. Where the hell are you rushing off to? Today’s off.”

* * *

The second time is much like the first, except this time it was cheap red wine and cheap brandy, and this time Adam strips off his shirt when they stumble into Reece’s flat and sleeps on his side, at first, curled away from Reece. The long expanse of Adam’s golden back is distracting, to say the least. Reece lays awake for what feels like hours trying not to think about biting into the solid flesh of one of those shoulders or stringing kisses down that spine.

In the morning, Adam is once again sprawled on his stomach, taking up most of the mattress, and Reece gets up despite the hammering in his head because it’s less torturous than balancing on the edge of both his mattress and his self-discipline.

It’s eleven o’clock when the eggs and coffee are ready, and Adam startles awake again when Reece replaces the frying pan on the hob a bit less carefully than he’d intended.

“Fuck,” Adam says, rubbing one eye with the heel of his hand, only half sitting up. “What–“

“It’s eleven,” Reece answers.

“Shit,” Adam springs up again, just like last week. “I gotta go.” He sniffs the T-shirt he’d discarded on the floor last night, nose wrinkling, then raids Reece’s drawer for a clean one.

“Help yourself!” Reece calls out as Adam closes the door behind him.

* * *

The third time follows the same pattern, or nearly so.

“Your shirt is on the dresser.”

“My what?” Adam asks, still bleary-eyed.

“From last week. I washed it.”

“You washed it?”

Reece shrugs, eyes still on the eggs he’s scrambling.

“I wanted to still have some T-shirts of my own.”

Adam grunts, and Reece decides to interpret it as a “Thank you.” He congratulates himself on his nearly perfect scrambled eggs and only permits himself to wonder a little about where Adam is high-tailing it off to every Sunday morning like a bat out of hell.

* * *

This time is different. Reece is only half as drunk as he’d usually be, and it’s early, by their standards. Half gone three in the morning. There are still a few people on the streets, smoking and laughing and stumbling into taxis. Adam is hanging off Reece’s arm, his head lolling onto Reece’s shoulder, and Reece is struggling to shuffle them to his flat. Luckily, Adam perks up at the door to Reece’s building, turning suddenly from a near dead weight to a live wire. He’s out of Reece’s grasp and racing up the stairs before Reece even has time to take his key out of the door.

When Reece finally makes it to the top of the five flights, winded, Adam is waiting at the door. No, not _waiting_. He’s posed himself, ridiculously, like some sort of pin-up. He’s shucked his T-shirt already, and he’s leaning back against Reece’s door with his arms crossed in front of his chest, biceps flexed. It makes Reece’s cock twitch, and he hates himself for it.

The closer Reece gets, the more apparent it is just how off his head Adam really is. He’s swaying very slightly from side to side, and his eyes are glassy and unfocused. Somehow he manages to track Reece’s movement, or at least Reece _feels_ Adam’s eyes on him as he heaves him aside to get to the lock.

Adam doesn’t rush out before noon the next morning. He wakes around nine—waking Reece too—and vomits violently into Reece’s toilet, then sleeps for another six hours, sweating a dark patch on Reece’s sheets that spreads slowly as the hours pass, then evaporates into nothing.

Adam accepts coffee at three thirty in the afternoon, but not eggs. He looks like death warmed over: wan, with dark circles under his eyes, and a bit of a tremor in his left hand that he’s trying to hide by holding tight to his own knee under the table.

Reece watches and aches for him, and not in the usual way that he does. Adam is young and cocky and very easy on the eyes, and Reece is quite gay—completely gay, really—but doesn’t get laid much because he works twenty hours a day shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of guys where it’s difficult to tell the difference between theatrical machismo and deep-rooted homophobia. So he aches, generally, and towards Adam in particular on the kind of day when Adam is on fire, a knife flashing in his hand and culinary miracles forming under his fingertips. (Adam has nice hands. Reece likes the way they look holding a plate out, ready for service, but he thinks he’d like the way they’d look wrapped around his cock better.)

But this ache, this ache is different. This is the ache of watching someone you care about fall, without knowing if there’s anything to catch them or how deep the chasm goes.

* * *

Adam is off his head again, this time, but it must be something different. He’s _alive_ , not out of it, and he keeps _touching_. He’s had his arm over Reece’s shoulders for the better part of the hour, and now he’s pushing his fingers up through the short hair at the nape of Reece’s neck, over and over again, and Reece might just be driven mad if he does it one more time.

He does it again.

When the group breaks at the crack of dawn, Adam is still buzzing, but not stumbling, and not so incapacitated that he couldn’t make his own way home, but he starts following Reece anyway, and Reece feels an unwelcome rush of relief wash through him. Instead of a refreshing spring rain, it’s more like a high-cresting wave on a littered beach, bringing up nothing but greasy chips wrappers and bottles and beer cans and god knows what else.

“Tea?” Reece offers, once they’re inside. Usually they’re not so sober—or sober-ish, in Adam’s case—at this point, and he doesn’t know what to do. So he’s attempting to put the kettle on, when suddenly Adam is behind him, warm against his back.

“I didn’t come here for fucking _tea_ ,” Adam growls.

“What did you come here fo–“ Reece loses the thread of his question as Adam opens his mouth on Reece’s neck, starting at his nape and sucking wet kisses down to the meat of his shoulder, pulling at the collar of Reece’s shirt to get better access until he can’t go any further.

Reece turns. He backs Adam into the far wall and kisses him hard before either of them can think to stop this. This is what they both want now: messy and wet and hot, and Adam was the one who started it, so Reece can’t feel guilty. He _won’t_ , not when Adam is hooking a leg around his to pull his hips closer. Not when Adam is grinding against his thigh with a solid length of cock.

Reece wants to see it and taste it and swallow as much of it as he can, and he drops to his knees to do just that and is rewarded, immediately, by Adam’s hands in his hair again, almost gentle.

Not gentle once Reece has him in his mouth, but that’s OK, because it keeps Reece tethered to the here and now when he feels the sting of Adam pulling too hard. Reece’s eyes begin to water. Adam smells and tastes like musk and sweat, but there’s garlic too, and shallots, and sage, because Adam was on sauces earlier.

Adam controls the pace, pulling at Reece’s hair and pushing a little to sheathe himself deeper, until Reece gags a little and Adam pulls off, looking down. Reece is about to say, “Just give us a second,” but he’s not sure his voice is going to come out. His throat feels raw already, but he doesn’t want to stop, so he ignores the question in Adam’s eyes and leans in to lick around the base of Adam’s cock, curling his tongue around it. Adam shudders and gentles his hands in Reece’s hair, so Reece does it again. Then again, followed by a long slow lick all the way to the tip of Adam’s cock where he’s leaking, and Reece starts taking him in again, and this time Adam lets him stay in control, and Reece doesn’t know if it’s out of politeness or because Adam is too close. A sudden flood of bitterness in Reece’s mouth answers that question. He swallows because it’s the choice that keeps him close to Adam and doesn’t make a mess, and he sits back on his heels while Adam comes back to himself.

“You–“ Adam starts as he fists a hand in the front of Reece’s shirt and hauls him up. Then he’s kissing Reece again, deeper and deeper, and Reece scrambles with his trousers and pants until he can at least rub himself in the crease of Adam’s thigh and groin, slicking the skin there with his own wetness, while Adam continues to hold him by the back of his head, kissing him and kissing him until Reece’s jaw aches.

Reece comes against Adam’s skin, and he tears his mouth away from Adam’s to breathe through it. It’s fast and brutal, like a punch to the gut, and Adam is vengeful about the loss of Reece’s mouth. He attacks Reece’s neck in retaliation, sucking hard and biting and moving his arm to clamp around Reece’s waist like a vice.

Somehow even though they’ve both come, Adam doesn’t want to stop. Eventually he pushes Reece down onto the mattress and keeps at him like an incubus with an oral fixation. Just when Reece falls asleep he doesn’t remember; maybe Adam had still been sucking on a nipple or tracing his tongue from the crease of Reece’s elbow along his bicep to his armpit.

Reece wakes in the morning with the sun streaming in again in two thick stripes and without any feeling in his left arm. Adam probably started sprawled mostly on top of him, but he’s rolled to the side, and his shoulder is cutting off all the circulation in Reece’s left arm. They’re both naked, and _sticky_ , Reece realizes in his first attempt to move a little, testing how solidly he’s trapped.

He’s very trapped; there’s little hope of extricating himself without waking Adam, which normally Reece wouldn’t mind, except that he _knows_ —deep in his gut there’s a little hard kernel of truth that won’t let him deny it—he knows that Adam had been off his head the night before, and Reece isn’t so keen to discover what his reaction will be, in the sober light of day, to what they’ve done.

Adam grunts when Reece shifts his weight with enough force to unpin himself and roll Adam all the way to the side and off. He grunts again when the sunlight hits his face after Reece steps to the side, and he uses one arm to shield his eyes.

“I’m taking a shower,” Reece says. “Then I’ll make breakfast.”

Adam is gone when Reece steps out from the bathroom.

* * *

The next time it happens, it’s honestly the last thing that Reece is expecting or planning. Because Adam. _Adam_. Adam is a lying, thieving little shit, and he lies and steals and thieves to get more drugs, obviously, and the drugs are making him lose the weight he gained in those first few months in Paris. He’s taken on that hungry look again: his collarbone stands out when he wears a loose-necked T-shirt and Reece gets a glimpse of it, and his hipbones jut above the waistband of the low-slung, well-worn jeans he always wears to Le Saint-Sauveur. He still comes, every Saturday night, but he arrives later than everyone else because he always has something—or someone—to do first, or both.

When he arrives late and offers to buy everyone a round, grinning and laughing and telling lewd jokes, he smells of sex and someone’s perfume. He takes his seat next to Reece, cramming himself into the too-small left over space so that his thigh and Reece’s are pressed together, hip to knee. It takes a lot of alcohol to mellow him out from his high, and at the end of the evening he does a convincing job of playing sober when it’s really just uppers and downers all but cancelling each other out.

Other nights, Adam shows up spacey and glassy-eyed, and he hardly drinks except to keep up appearances, and everyone talks over him while he’s slouching in the corner of the booth, sweat blooming at his temples.

Reece hates to admit it, but the first high is the one he prefers, even if it brings Adam in smelling like a quickie. Reece has never really dabbled in drugs beyond a bit of weed in his teenage years, and he doesn’t really want to know or even guess what Adam’s substances of choice are, but the second high, the one that makes him slow, like a blow to the head with a blunt instrument… That one scares him. It looks like the kind of thing that could kill you, just by making you not care if you live or die because all you care about is your next hit.

Today Adam is almost on time, and he’s enthusiastic about getting the night going. He buys a bottle of absinthe for the table and doles out the first round himself, precise as always with his technique: spoon, sugar, and an evenly paced drip of ice water. Reece hates how impressed he is at Adam’s focus even when he’s so clearly plastered.

Not to mention that Reece _saw_ him in the morning, carefully wrapping a black truffle in wax paper and sleeving it before transferring it to a pocket, when he had the chance and thought no one was watching. He skipped the family meal between the lunch and dinner services and now he’s off his head in record-setting time. The connection is obvious, and Reece can only wonder if the €75 or so the truffle is probably worth on the street is enough for more than one hit, or if it’s only enough to provide Adam with tonight’s high.

“You’re quiet,” Adam says into Reece’s ear, very quickly close at Reece’s side.

Christ, he’s got a lot of nerve. “I’m not in the mood, Adam.” Reece leans away, but takes the glass of absinthe that’s on offer and downs it in one gulp.

“Not in the mood for what?”

Reece stands, because crossing the border from one moment to the next, it becomes just too much. Reece remembers that sharp musk-sweat smell and doesn’t want to ache for more of it like he does. Not tonight. “Never mind,” he answers, heading for the back door that exits into the alley, from where only two dozen steps separate him from his building.

Adam follows. Adam follows close behind Reece and maintains the lack of distance even once they’re outside. He crowds Reece up against the brick of a building and speaks into his ear, words manifest from harsh puffs of breath, “What the fuck is your problem?”

“You,” Reece spits, and he ruins it by pushing his ass back into Adam. Adam is more than half hard and grinds into it, then flips Reece easily, with a bruising grip on Reece’s arms, so that Reece’s back is to the brick and Adam can kiss him, wet and messy, just like before.

But before Adam wasn’t so preoccupied with Reece’s ass, groping and kneading it with both hands, which means he can’t control the kiss much, but that doesn’t leave Reece much control; it just makes it messier.

Somehow they end up at Reece’s, on the damn mattress. Or rather, Reece is on the damn mattress, face-down with his trousers and pants around his ankles, and Adam is kneeling wide, his knees on either side of Reece’s thighs. Adam spits in his palm and then he’s on Reece, his cock sliding in the cleft of Reece’s ass, so teasingly close to what Reece really wants—Adam inside him—and yet almost all the more arousing for the fact that it only hints at deeper pleasures. The head of Adam’s cock is slippery, and Reece can almost _see_ the shape of it as Adam moves, nudging the backs of Reece’s balls with it at the end of a stroke, then drawing it back over his perineum, a maddeningly light pressure that sparks at Reece’s nerves.

Reece comes almost as soon as Adam rolls them onto their sides and gets a hand on his cock, and Adam’s release follows soon after. Reece feels marked by it, and as his heart slows, he remembers his boiling rage from before, remembers the truffle and Adam’s sneaking out, and it all boils up again. He extricates himself from Adam’s now-loose embrace with no gentleness, but Adam doesn’t complain. Adam is already fucking asleep.

Reece showers, steals the duvet and the pillow from the mattress where Adam is dead to the world, and sleeps on the floor by the window. The light wakes him even earlier than usual, just as he wanted. He makes his breakfast quietly, eats it quietly, and returns to his nest on the floor after, feigning sleep.

Reece doesn’t have to open his eyes to watch Adam when he wakes. He watches with his ears as Adam looks at the clock, swears, raids Reece’s drawers for clean boxers and a T-shirt, has a slash, and runs the sink just long enough to rinse his cock and splash water on his face, then leaves, closing the door gently behind him.

This time, Reece follows Adam. He follows Adam because he meant to shout some sense into him last night but got fucked instead. He follows Adam because Adam because Adam taught him a quicker, cleaner technique for fileting sole the week he’d arrived and didn’t smirk about it even a little. (This is not to say that Adam isn’t arrogant. He’s that _and_ a good teacher.)

Reece follows Adam because watching Adam mince garlic and shallots and sage, his knife flashing, is like watching the fucking ballet, only better, because Reece doesn’t like ballet. He follows Adam because Adam is good and makes Reece strive to be better, and if Adam just throws it all away by way of white powders that come in little plastic baggies, that’s just not right. It’s not the world Reece wants to live in.

Reece follows Adam to a nondescript Italian restaurant in the 11th arrondissement. It looks nice enough, if obviously not fine dining. Reece watches as Adam avoids the front door and slips around the back. Reece peers carefully around the corner to see Adam knocking on the kitchen door, then waiting. He pulls something from his pocket, and it’s the sound of the waxed paper that Reece recognizes.

“Buongiorno,” Adam says, smiling, when a grizzled man in an apron opens the door. He holds up the waxed paper-wrapped truffle, offering it.

Reece is too stunned to follow the rapid conversation—a bit of Italian, but mostly French—that follows, and too soon the kitchen door is shut again behind Adam, and Reece is left to the revision of his theories.

So Adam didn’t steal the truffle to score more drugs, but he stole it to give it to another chef? And he didn’t _just_ give it away because he went inside and hasn’t come back out. Reece waits for maybe ten minutes, and when Adam still doesn’t come back out, he wanders away, intending to head back home, but then a coffee shop catches his eye, and he goes in for an espresso. After the espresso, he orders a cappuccino to go for the road, and when he leaves the shop he gravitates back to the restaurant. None of it makes any sense. And fuck it, but Reece just wants to know what the fuck Adam is up to. So he waits.

Adam sees him immediately when he finally emerges from the kitchen door around four o’clock.

“Did you fucking follow me?” he accuses.

Reece doesn’t shift from his slouch against the building opposite. “I wanted to know where you were always running off to every Sunday. To be honest, I expected it to be…scoring smack or something.”

Adam almost chokes on his laughter. “No one has a standing appointment with their dealer every Sunday at eleven.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Fuck you,” Adam spits. The turn from amused to raging happens in a split-second, and Reece is momentarily stunned into silence. He’s tripped something or triggered something, and it occurs for the first time that there might be no going back from this. Reece might just ruin everything between them.

“What are you doing here then?” Reece asks, aiming for a mildly interested tone in the hopes of introducing some calm back into the conversation.

“That’s none of your fucking business.”

“It is when I saw you steal that truffle.”

“Are you fucking _stalking_ me?”

“No,” Reece says, and even he’s not convinced. It probably shows.

“ _God_ ,” Adam runs a hand through his hair in frustration, “it’s not any of your fucking business, but before you come to some insane conclusion– Jean-Luc recommended this place. I give Massimo’s prep cook a break one day a week, and Massimo teaches me Italian cuisine. Not all of us went to fucking culinary school.”

“And the truffle?”

“Sure, I borrowed it. Massimo said he’d teach me a few recipes if I brought my own.”

“So you stole it.”

“Going to tattle on me, Reece?”

“Fuck you, Adam.” Reece doesn’t shout it. He’s angry, but more at the situation and a little at himself. His suspicions look rather stupid in hindsight. But the fact remains that Adam is spiraling. Even now the needle punctures are visible in the crook of his left elbow. Reece latched onto the only clues he had hoping for a confrontation—an intervention, really—and he isn’t going to get that.

* * *

Adam gets promoted to sous chef on the strength of a set of Italian-French fusion dishes, among them puttanesca with niçoise olives and Rödel sardines instead of anchovies. It’s the kind of dish that’s so blindingly perfect and obvious, at least in hindsight, that Reece curses himself for not having thought of it.

Following his promotion, Adam is…OK, for a while. He’s trying, clearly. Almost sober more often than not, and the needle marks in the crooks of his elbows fade, slowly. He’s still fucking half the waitstaff on a semi-regular basis, and his weight stabilizes somewhere between gaunt and willowy, and the fact that Reece tracks that is a fucking embarrassment.

Reece buys a bed. He gets rid of the old mattress on the floor and buys a bed and a new mattress from Ikea. It’s nothing fancy, obviously, and he has to enlist Max’s help to put it together.

“Why did you buy this fucking thing?” Max asks in a moment of despair, when it looks like they’ve put part of the frame together wrong side ‘round and are missing a long screw in addition.

“Somewhere to sleep?”

“What was wrong with your fucking mattress– Oh!” Max turns the pictorial instructions and holds them up to the side of the half-assembled frame to compare. “No, look! This is right. We did it right.”

_Because I’m an adult_ , Reece doesn’t answer. That’s why he bought a real fucking bed to sleep in. He puts it in the corner, facing the far wall, so that now the light through the windows falls in stripes across his feet. It’s harder to wake up in the morning without the sun on his face, but the change is good.

* * *

Adam’s return spiral is so slow as to be almost unnoticeable, except to those who are truly watching. Which is to say: except to Reece.

Adam’s cooking is more impressive than ever, and most weeks he seems to have a system that works for him. He disappears between services on average every other day, and sometimes he’s strung out when he gets back, and sometimes, infuriatingly, that works. He’ll be on fire, and it’s like he’s got eyes in the back of his head. He rides everyone hard, watches every flame and burner. He once called out for Reece to thin the sauce for the halibut without even turning around from the pass.

But slowly the disappearances get more frequent until they’re daily. And they stretch longer. Sometimes Adam even steps out during service to make a hurried exchange with someone out back.

On New Year’s Eve Reece catches an eyeful of Adam skimming out of the till—a handful of €100 bills, by the looks of it—and he only considers very briefly taking this more serious infraction than that damn truffle to Jean-Luc. It’ll be his words against Adam’s, in the end, and Adam is Jean-Luc’s golden boy, his protégé, and shaping up to be his star. Adam’s even had the gall to start taking out Jean-Luc’s daughter. There’s no way that Reece will gain anything meaningful in reporting Adam’s theft: Adam will sneer at him and tell him to fuck off, Jean-Luc will see him as the kind of cook who tries to get to the top by politicking rather than by craft, and Reece will cement a reputation as a rigid, rule-following stickler.

So Reece lets it happen. He steps back, surrenders. It’s not that difficult, in the end, but then Reece has had a lot of practice: cooking itself is the art of surrender. The work of it is true hard labor: sweat, aching joints, sometimes blood. The fruits of it are beautiful, carefully asymmetrically arranged on spotless porcelain. But the fruits of it are for someone _else_ to enjoy.

A chef tastes, but does not savor. He cares, often _deeply_ , but sometimes, nevertheless, the extent of his caring meets only a distraught wife, worried that her husband is cheating on her and hardly noticing—much less _tasting_ —what she puts into her mouth. Or it meets her husband, stewing in his sweaty, acrid anxiety over the affair that yes, he’s having with yes, his _executive assistant_ , what a cliché.

A chef decides what passes muster. What goes out and what gets made again. But he cannot decide whether the plate that crosses the rubicon gets eaten from at all. Sometimes, regrettably, it is forgotten. Or pushed aside. Or only picked at or through, by the distracted or the fussy.

The best chef in the world is the one who can put everything he’s got into a dish and then hand it off at the pass and not even think to look after it. The best chef in the world surrenders.

* * *

When Adam’s promoted again to head chef, Reece lets himself be wooed away to _Le Patrice_ as sous chef. He only finds out later that it’s the brother-in-law of Adam’s Massimo, his Italian cuisine tutor, who owns the place. Possibly, the thought occurs, it’s even a kind word from Adam that got Reece’s name in the ring for the job.

Reece moves house too, finds a new flat in the 6th arrondissement, an open loft with a low slanted ceiling spliced through at even intervals with large windows. It’s bright and sunny, and Reece stops sleeping more than five hours at a stretch. He’s exhausted all the time, but it’s worth it. The new place is a clean slate. Reece can go to bed and wake up without any ghost memories of Adam sprawled face down next to him, taking up too much space.

Within the space of three years, Adam has achieved his first and second stars, and Reece has been promoted to head chef and been awarded his first. Reece doesn’t feel jealous or even inferior. He’ll get there. He knows he’s not a prodigy, and there’s work yet to be done. Things left to learn. Now that he’s running his own kitchen he has the space and time to drive his own curriculum, as it were. He can experiment, and he does. Fusion is not a screaming success for the restaurant, neither Japanese-French nor Indian-French.

Reece is still planning what’s next when all time becomes forfeit. How exactly he’s done it is a mystery. (Reece would suspect carnal relations, but Simone Forth is openly a _lesbian_.) Nevertheless, somewhow Adam has Paris’ top food critic in his pocket, and not only that but has her casting unsubtle stones at _Le Patrice_. Suddenly Reece doesn’t have the time to learn: he’s fighting for his career, his livelihood.

And Adam is milking the attention from the press for all its worth. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship: Adam is never unhappy to supply a soundbite, and whatever he feeds the press is at the least off-color and usually downright offensive. When Reece puts a hotpot special on—classic French beef broth served with whole raw shrimp to be cooked in it, with a soy-olive-anchovy vinaigrette—that is “pandering.” And worse: Reece’s sous vide bourguignon is “a truly alarming sight coming out of a condom. If it’s that color inside when you’re finished, you need to see a doctor!”

In short: anything from Adam sells papers and gets clicks, and practically overnight the reservations dry up at _Le Patrice_. It’s not _cool_ to eat at the restaurant that that one rockstar chef says is shit.

A good night’s sleep becomes a distant memory. Reece is slipping, and what’s worse is that he fucking knows it. In the end, it’s almost a relief when it turns out that Nicolas, the owner, has been having the books cooked, wanting to avoid the disapproval of his father, who never thought that a restaurant would be a suitable sink for his only son’s trust fund. _Le Patrice_ fails and shuts its doors, and though it’s obviously not entirely Reece’s fault, he can’t help but think that if the reservations hadn’t dropped off after Adam’s press coup, maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe.

* * *

Reece hears about Adam’s death through the gossip mill. It’s not true, it turns out, but death is what everyone immediately assumed, and for the most part it’s also what they wanted. Add to that the appeal of the classic story—tortured genius dead by drug overdose—and it’s understandable that it takes as long as it does for the truth to emerge from the gossip. Adam is _gone_ , definitely, but there’s no real evidence, none at all, that he’s dead.

Reece drowns his relief in an entire bottle of burgundy, and by the time he’s only fingers from the bottom of the bottle, the relief has hardened and deepened into an aching worry. Over the next year that worry morphs too, stretching and twisting until it finds the low, flat shape of a simmering, buzzing anger. Anger at himself for never having had the balls to actually try to get Adam to stop. Anger at Adam for being so goddamned talented that he could still run a top-flight kitchen while drugging and drinking himself to the gills.

He hears about Anne-Marie’s abortion. Then a few months later he hears about how she had to drop out of school to check herself into rehab in Milan. Still no one has heard anything from Adam, and now that just makes Reece want to wring his neck if he ever shows his face again. Running away is easy and selfish, and Reece shouldn’t be surprised, because _selfish_ has got to be near the top of anyone’s list of identifying characteristics, when it comes to Adam.

Jean-Luc’s death is the final straw. It almost makes Reece wonder anew if Adam really is dead. Perhaps he overdosed in some horrible crack house and no one ever bothered to identify him. (Or, more tragically still: there was no one for the cops to contact that could have.) Adam never talked about keeping in touch with any family. Jean-Luc was undoubtedly the closest thing he had, which makes Reece wonder if Jean-Luc put any effort into finding Adam, or if Adam had torched even that bridge too thoroughly.

* * *

Somehow Paris is never the same again, with Adam gone and Jean-Luc passed away, so when Jack asks Reece to come to London and start something new, he doesn’t think twice. Jack’s been around the business long enough to be unimpressed by Adam’s theatrics, even if he does admit to being impressed by his cooking. He pitches a vision to Reece: everything local, everything new and modern, a kitchen more like a lab—quiet and clean and still—than like a Paris kitchen, with all the screaming and shouting and sweating and sometimes even violence. It’s different, the picture Jack paints for him, but Reece _wants_ different.

His first flat in London is in the city, a smallish place high off the ground in a steel-and-glass monstrosity that feels cold and hard and sharp, just like the blade of a quality, high carbon steel knife. Even up high there’s not much sun because the flat faces north, and the weather’s always shit in London besides. Reece sleeps more, and after the restaurant is settling into something that feels disturbingly like success, he even starts to date a little.

Colm is Irish and a banker, “but not the arsehole kind,” he’d said on their first date, “the very boring kind.” He’s fit and a sharp dresser, but not so sharp that he makes Reece feel like a slob. Reece wants to like him so badly that he probably tries a little too hard on their third date, inviting Colm over for home-cooking that turns into a five-course meal. Colm is impressed, and he’s kind when Reece comes shockingly fast under his mouth and patient while he works Reece back to hardness with one hand. He fucks Reece so slowly and gently that Reece considers losing his mind.

Colm is even the perfect bedmate after. He stays close without touching or crowding, doesn’t sprawl, and doesn’t steal more than his fair share of duvet or pillows. In the morning, Reece wakes alone in the bed and smells coffee.

“I have an early meeting,” Colm apologizes. “But I’ve left some coffee for you.” Reece nods dumbly, accepts a closed-mouth goodbye kiss, and falls back asleep.

It’s easy with Colm: he’s easy to like, easy to fuck, easy to fold into Reece’s life without disturbing much. It’s just as easy, it turns out, for him to walk away after two and a half years when he’s offered a job in Singapore, and that stings more than Reece expected it to.

Reece gives up on dating, gets his third star, and starts looking for a flat to buy because Jack gave him a huge bonus for the stars and keeps dropping unsubtle hints about real estate. He goes to view a newly renovated Georgian in East London. It faces south, and it’s positively flooded with light in the morning. There’s a good coffee roaster nearby, and the tube is only a block away. So Reece buys it, moves in, and after a few weeks of restlessness he adopts a dog too, a middle-aged Dalmation that thinks, despite her size, that she’s a lap dog. The woman at the adoption center had warned Reece that she’s very food-motivated, and Reece had replied, deadpan, “I’m a three-star Michelin chef. I think we’ll get along fine.” She’s called Freida, but Reece takes to calling her Fry, and she’s doesn’t seem to mind.

Then Adam Jones comes back from the dead. Or fucking Louisiana, as it turns out.

* * *

Adam comes to the restaurant, and the sneering arrogance is familiar but no less enraging for it.

“You let him get to you,” Tony explains over a drink at the Savoy, later and at Reece’s request.

“Don’t we all?”

“Sure,” Tony pauses. “I know this probably doesn’t help, or you’re just going to think that I’m deluding myself. I know everyone knows how I feel about him, but– I think he really is going to try. He’s stopped…everything.”

“You really believe that?”

Tony doesn’t really answer. He drops his eyes and traces a finger around the base of his wine glass. “You know, he was very specific about one thing in his list.”

“His list?”

Tony waves a hand. “All the things he’s quit. No more booze, no more drugs, and no more women.”

“That’s how he put it? No more _women_.”

Tony nods, then shrugs. “He’s been staying in the hotel. Hasn’t touched the minibar.”

“I think you know what my advice is,” Reece says. “I won’t keep telling you not to if you’ve made up your mind. Just– Be careful.” Reece doesn’t even know what he means: careful not to _get_ hurt by Adam or careful not to hurt him. Which is to say: be careful not to let Adam hurt _himself_. Adam is always and only his own worst enemy.

* * *

Reece doesn’t sleep the night that Adam tries to kill himself with a fucking sous-vide bag, of all things. After Adam cries himself out he falls asleep, and for a while Reece can’t let him go. His feet have long since fallen asleep under him. The floor is cold, but Adam’s skin bleeds a little warmth through his T-shirt. His chest expands and contracts, and Reece’s hand rises and falls with it.

When the noise had drawn Reece back into the kitchen, it was red hot anger that lanced through him, first. How _dare_ Adam show up off his head and fuck everything up, so soon after the relaunch.

He’d watched first, but then watching wasn’t enough. Because Adam would have done it. Somehow. Nothing will ever again feel as long as that minute Reece spent fighting to claw that damn bag off Adam’s head. He’d screamed for Jack, and Jack hadn’t come because Reece had ordered everyone out, and they’d obeyed, all of them. Jack included. So it was just Reece and Adam in the strangest sort of epic showdown: four hands scrabbling at a thin layer of plastic.

It was easier to get a grip, in the end, at the back of Adam’s head where his hair provided a smooth slide under the plastic for the tips of Reece’s fingers, so he could finally get a fucking hold. But Adam still struggled, and Reece’s vision narrowed to nothing. The seconds stretched; his heart pounded a slow-motion rhythm in his ears, but then his fingers found purchase again, and he pulled and the plastic ripped and Adam gasped, drawing in breath.

_Not tonight_ , Reece thought. _Not while I can help it._

And now he’s loathe to let him go, and that might not be healthy, not for either of them. So Reece rolls Adam gently to the floor, and once the pins and needles have died down enough, Reece finds some spare linens and stuffs some under Adam’s head after he rolls him to his side, in case he vomits. The tablecloth he drapes over Adam. He starts to tuck it in around him but then suddenly it looks an awful lot like a straightjacket, so he stops.

It’s not the first time Reece has stayed at the restaurant overnight, but it’s been a while. At first he tries to sleep. There’s a sofa in his office, an uncomfortable overstuffed thing, but he’s slept on it before. It’s not the discomfort that keeps him awake: his thoughts circle and swoop and spiral, and Adam’s at the center of all of them, so eventually Reece drags himself back up and makes a cup of tea.

* * *

Adam eats his eggs and drinks his coffee, but he doesn’t go immediately. “Reece,” he starts, and Reece has to turn from the far worktop where he’s been pretending to ignore Adam. “Thank you.”

Reece raises a hand to wave off the gratitude. They’ve been through this already, after all.

But Adam continues, “And I’m sorry. Not just for last night. For all of it.”

“All of what?” Reece isn’t sure why he even asks. Adam—this new Adam—hasn’t exactly shrunk from admitting his faults. They both know what he’s going to say.

“All of the booze and drugs and being a raging asshole, I guess,” Adam says, waving a hand in the air to indicate everything that’s obvious to the both of them. Adam looks down at the worktop and fiddles with the empty plate that held his eggs, pushing it an inch or two further from the edge. His mouth bends into a half-smile, and then he looks up again. “And maybe for the fact that this is the first breakfast you’ve cooked for me that I’ve actually eaten.”

* * *

Reece hears about the Michelin mix up through Jack. Jack, loyal as ever, frowns when Reece heaves a sigh of relief at the news.

“Oh,” Jack muses, a touch of smugness in his voice, “you just want him to have another chance at it so that you can say you beat him, fair and square. No sabotage involved.”

“No,” Reece replies, “I want him to have another chance because I think he might actually deserve it.”

* * *

Adam Jones is next to the last person Reece might have expected to be standing across the street from his building when he emerges to walk Fry at nine-thirty on Sunday morning. Adam has his head tipped back against the building opposite. There’s a paper bag at his feet. Reece can’t help but run a quick assessment: no new bruises, but the sunglasses Adam is wearing prevent Reece from being able to tell at a glance if he’s sober.

Reece crosses the street, and Fry introduces herself before Reece can think of how to break the ice himself. She puts her nose to the bag at Adam’s feet, snuffling with an eagerness that can only mean food is inside. The motion startles Adam into awareness.

“You have a dog?”

“Fry, heel!” Reece tries, but he has to bend down to grab her collar to keep her from getting into the bag.

“What are you doing here?”

Adam picks up the bag and offers it. “I brought you breakfast. And I wanted to tell you. Last week– It wasn’t the Michelin men.”

“I heard.”

“Ah, news travel fast.”

“Jack keeps tabs on you,” Reece admits.

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?”

“I think he’s more worried about his investment, to be honest.”

Adam chuckles, and Reece feels himself smiling too.

“She needs her walk. Join me if you want.”

Adam falls into step, and it’s surprisingly natural. Reece feet lead them, without any conscious thought on Reece’s part, to the good coffee place, and Adam offers to go in while Reece waits outside with Fry, and after he returns with two hand pours, the conversation flows as if this is something that they’ve always done.

But eventually they’re back at Reece’s place. Adam hands the bag over.

“Come up?” Reece offers, “I’ll make more coffee.”

“Thanks, but I already ate mine,” Adam indicates the bag. “That’s just for you.”

“Next time, then.”

“Yeah, sure,” Adam says, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Next time.”

* * *

Adam brings pastries for both of them, the following Sunday. And the Sunday after that, and the one after that. They walk Fry, stop for coffee, then Reece makes more coffee and whatever Adam’s bought this week is consumed at the kitchen table.

It’s the fifth Sunday in a row when Reece finally asks why. He asks just after he’s crossed the street to meet Adam, Fry pulling at the leash to get closer faster because she likes the way Adam scritches behind her ears. “Not that I’m complaining, but what is this? Some kind of…making amends?”

Adam doesn’t seem very surprised by the question. “Maybe the baked goods and the coffee, but–“ he pushes off from the wall and crouches down to greet Fry, “I wouldn’t really consider imposing my company on you any form of reparation.” Adam stands and brushes his hands off on his jeans.

They start walking towards Reee’s coffee place, and Adam still doesn’t elaborate. “And?”

“And what?”

“What is it then?”

“Does it matter? I mean, tell me if you mind, and I’ll stop coming, but–“

“I don’t mind,” Reece interrupts hastily. “I like our routine.” (The “our” is new. Reece likes it.)

“Good.” At first Reece thinks that’s going to be the end of it, but then Adam actually does elaborate. “Sometimes now it’s just like there’s so much time to fill. Especially on the weekends.”

Reece doesn’t have anything to reply to that, so he changes the subject. It makes him a bit sad, he wouldn’t tell Adam. Adam is lonely and trying to put together a support system for himself, and the fact that he’s reached out to _Reece_ , of all people, _Reece_ , who called Adam his enemy to his face only a couple of months ago… The enemy thing isn’t true anymore, of course, and maybe it never truly was. Also: Reece _does_ like the routine they’ve settled into, this past month, and maybe wouldn’t even mind seeing Adam _more_ often, and that’s a strange realization to come to.

Adam has never been a force of good in Reece’s life; he’s been quite the opposite. And while Reece certainly nursed a grudge after Paris, he’s never truly hated Adam because what drives Adam most into doing the awful things he does—or perhaps _did_ , now—isn’t something that’s really in his control. He’s an addict. That’s something Reece recognized and has accepted for years. The fact of it doesn’t make it any easier. And yet.

The problem is, maybe Adam isn’t just an addict anymore. He’ll always be an addict, of course, but he might just be growing into something that looks and feels an awfully lot like a good man. Kind, respectful, mellowed. (And still fucking attractive, especially when he’s not shaven for a week and he smiles that sly little half-smile of his.)

* * *

Reece’s phone wakes him up, and he doesn’t have to look at the clock to know it’s past nine o’clock. Well past, judging by the flood of light.

It’s Adam on the phone, says the caller ID.

“Hey,” Reece mumbles into the phone.

“You OK? I’ve been here for a half hour, not that– We don’t have to–“

“Event last night,” Reece gets out, “Didn’t get home until half five.”

“Ah,” Adam acknowledges. Then he offers, “Want me to walk Fry?” She’s whining in the background now that Reece is something more lively than a treestump, and Adam must have heard.

“Sure, thanks, yeah, I’ll buzz you up.”

The thing that wakes Reece up is the way that Adam looks at him when he answers the door. He’s still in just the threadbare T-shirt and the boxers that he slept in, and Adam’s eyes track slowly from his face all the way down, and then he looks away suddenly and busies himself with finding Fry’s leash.

“Go back to bed and call me when you wake up for real,” Adam instructs, hooking the leash to Fry’s collar. “I’m sure we can keep ourselves occupied. It’s a nice day.”

“You don’t have to. I’m up now. I’ll have–“ _breakfast_ , he’s about to offer.

“No seriously, Reece, go back to bed. You look like hell.”

“Do I.” That’s certainly not what it looked like Adam’s assessment was, just a minute ago. Not that Reece is intending to challenge Adam on that, but he’s still not awake, and the almost question just slips through his brain-to-mouth filter.

Adam hears the challenge; he coughs awkwardly, then recovers himself and rolls his eyes. He points to Reece, then to Reece’s bedroom, and he walks out with Fry and without uttering another word.

Reece does go back to sleep, as ordered. It’s mid-afternoon by the time he wakes and texts Adam. Adam returns twenty minutes later with Fry, and he lets her loose as soon as Reece buzzes him in. Reece is just out of the shower, still wrapped in just a towel because his dressing gown is inconveniently in the wash.

“I brought sandwiches,” Adam calls out.

Reece rolls his eyes even though Adam can’t see him in the bedroom. “Sometimes I think you think I don’t have any food at home,” he calls out. “We could have made sandwiches here.”

Fry’s nails make little pitter-patter sounds on the hardwood flooring as she trots towards the sound of Reece’s voice. Reece is rummaging in his wardrobe for a shirt, so his hands are occupied when Fry skids into him, nosing for his attention. Reece’s towel, only loosely tucked around his waist, is the casualty in this onslaught, and of course it happens just when Adam turns the corner at the top of the stairs.

“I don’t make sandwiches,” Adam is saying, and then he’s just silent, but he doesn’t look away from Reece’s…everything.

And Reece isn’t _mortified_ , precisely. He’s an adult. Adam’s an adult. It’s the ridiculousness of the moment, really, that has him tipping his face to the ceiling and shaking his head. Because _really_.

“Are you just going to stand there?” he asks. Because Adam hasn’t moved a muscle.

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” Adam says, matter-of-fact.

“I haven’t forgotten.” Reece can feel the weight of Adam’s gaze—not particularly burdensome, just there—while he pulls on the shirt he’d retrieved from the wardrobe and rummages for pants and trousers, then puts them on too.

When he finally looks at Adam, Adam just holds out one of the takeaway cups he’s holding and offers, “Cappuccino?”

Reece suggests a movie to go with the sandwiches, in part because he wants something other than silence to fill the space between him and Adam. At the end of it, when the credits are rolling, Adam is still sitting next to him on the sofa, but he’s put his feet up on the coffee table, and at some point he stretched an arm across the back of the sofa, behind Reece’s shoulders. He looks comfortable; relaxed.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” Adam affirms, turning his head just slightly to catch Reece’s gaze.

“Why did you tell Tony you’d given up women along with the drugs and booze?”

Adam pulls his arm from the back of the sofa and hunches over, resting his elbows on his knees. “Women were just like the drugs and booze.”

“Just women?”

Adam doesn’t sit up, but he looks at Reece again, over his shoulder. “I don’t fall in love with women.”

“And you do fall in love with men?”

“I have,” Adam says simply. He rubs his knees and sits up again.

_I have_ meaning some abstract time in the past? Reece wonders, or _I have_ meaning recently, and still true now?

“I should–“ Adam starts to stand, but in a split second decision Reece stops him with a hand on his arm, just below his elbow. He reaches for the back of Adam’s neck too, and pulls his face close, hesitating only a fraction of a second to judge the angles of noses and lips before he kisses Adam, soft and slow. Adam lets out a sigh, immediately, but otherwise doesn’t jump in to participate or pull away, so Reece kisses him again, lingering. (And testing.) He starts to pull away, but then Adam initiates the third kiss, even softer than the first two. He’s distracted, a little, busy shifting to get a hand on Reece, on the side of his neck with his thumb pressed to the pulse point under Reece’s jaw.

Reece shifts closer, his knees bumping Adam’s, and Adam opens his mouth, and the next kiss is an invitation to exploration, deep and searching, and the answer that Reece finds is a deep wellspring of affection alongside the lust that’s always been there.

But when Reece gets a hand under Adam’s T-shirt and starts to tug it upwards, Adam pushes him away. Gently, and with a parting kiss to the corner of Reece’s mouth. “Not tonight,” he says.

Reece raises an eyebrow at him.

“I’m still working on my impulse control,” Adams says ruefully. “And–“

_And you need to think about it more_ , Reece supposes he was going to say.

Adam doesn’t finish, and instead gets up to find his jacket. Before he leaves, Reece steals a final kiss and replies to what went unspoken, “I’m not going to change my mind.”

* * *

The Langham doesn’t close at all. Hotels don’t take holidays. But _Reece_ closes for two weeks at the end of August, and this year is the first that Reece is not looking forward to it. He booked the train back to Swansea months ago, and Bryn will be furious with him if he cancels. His sister’s second son is only six months old, and Reece hasn’t even met him yet. Luckily that trip is only the first three days of his holiday, and the rest—Italy, Spain—is changeable.

Reece just has to find the right moment to ask Adam to come along, at least for a few days. The right moment, he suspects, will be in the afterglow.

Sex with Adam now is not at all like it was before. Sometimes it has the same character—hard and fast and urgent—but it’s still different, in some way that Reece can’t quite pin down. The obvious superficial difference is Adam’s sobriety, and the physical difference is the twenty some-odd pounds of solid, heathy muscle that he carries in addition to what he weighed before. But neither of those differences feel like they can explain the whole of it.

Adam is home relatively early, since it’s a Tuesday, and he doesn’t offer any criticism of the truffle risotto that Reece has left a half-portion of for him, from his own dinner, not until Reece prompts, “Out with it, sweetheart,”—the endearment earns a steely glare—“tell me what could be better.”

The foreplay starts in the kitchen, as it often does. Adam lets Reece take the lead and push him up against the fridge kissing him deeply while he’s got one hand on Adam’s waist and the other pulling his cock from his trousers. Adam’s cock is half hard, and Reece drops to his knees to help it along. By now, it’s a familiar position and a familiar taste, but for all that the slide of Adam’s cock over Reece’s tongue is something that never seems to get old. Nor do the sounds Adam makes: the little grunt when his cockhead touches Reece’s soft palate and the whine when Reece scrapes his teeth very lightly along the underside.

Adam really does have phenomenal self-control these days. His cock twitches in Reece’s mouth, which Reece knows from experience means Adam is on a hair-trigger, but today, as he’s done before, Adam puts his hands on Reece’s cheeks and pushes his face away, gently, grunting again as the relative coldness of the air freezes his impending orgasm in its tracks.

“Not yet?” Reece asks lightly.

“Not yet,” Adam growls back at him. “I want you inside me.”

Reece hums an assent and kisses Adam again, letting him taste as much as he wants until the taste of Adam fades from his mouth. Which is just about when Adam gets a little impatient—understandably, given how hot and silk-sheathed steel-hard his cock is, poking at Reece’s hip—and manhandles Reece to the bedroom.

Adam prefers to be fucked, these days. And he likes it lots of ways, but he likes it best as the little spoon, turned a bit more onto his stomach than his side to give Reece leverage. He doesn’t like much prep, so it’s always slow going at first. Reece pushes in an inch or two, by tiny increments, and then waits. If Adam doesn’t relax, he pulls out again and rubs his cock in Adam’s cleft while he reaches around to thumb at Adam’s nipples or stroke down his belly to take his cock in hand. He pushes in again when Adam is panting or even begging, and by the third try, usually, Adam relaxes enough to let him all the way in.

Tonight it takes four tries for Adam to open up, and on the fourth he’s still vice-tight, but he’s growling at Reece not to stop, so Reece holds the base of his cock and pushes in slowly. When he’s too far in to use his hand for guidance he moves it to Adam’s chest, right over his sternum. Adam heaves out a deep breath and opens, all at once, and Reece groans. Adam’s heart leaps under his palm, and Reece can’t bear to pull away at all, so he simply grinds into Adam in sharp tiny thrusts. Adam jerks himself off, and a bit of his come splatters the back of Reece’s wrist when he comes. The sudden, almost painful tightness of Adam’s orgasm stops the progress of Reece’s momentarily, but Adam relaxes fully once he’s finished, and then it’s only a dozen or so slow, long strokes, the opposite of the short ones before, that Reece needs to get there. On the last stroke before he comes, just after Adam has crooked up his knee to let Reece in deeper and twisted his head around to kiss Reece’s shoulder, his cock is so sensitive and Adam is so velvety hot inside that Reece feels a lump in his throat growing with his orgasm, and when it washes over him, down through his thighs and calves and toes, he sobs once, silently.

* * *

Reece is glad that Barcelona is the last city he booked, back when he planned this trip just for himself. It’s a city full of magical things—the otherworldly bright LSD-dream architecture of Gaudí as well as seafood so fresh that it tastes like it expired only moments before hitting your plate. And it’s a city good for long strolls. Except now, at the end of August, when it’s a million fucking degrees.

Adam weathers the heat far better than Reece does. He sweats buckets—they both do—but he doesn’t seem to mind, just mops his face and neck with a handkerchief that Reece had no idea he carried and drinks a lot of water.

The hotel’s air conditioning is good enough to make sex possible, at least. It’d be disappointing if this, their last evening before it’s back to London, didn’t end in mutual orgasms of some kind. But it has. And now Adam is on his back, one arm tucked behind his head, and Reece is curled next to him, one leg tucked between Adam’s and one arm draped over his chest.

“What’s the first thing you ever cooked?” Adam asks drowsily.

Reece thinks for a bit. “Scrambled eggs, probably. My grandfather taught me.”

“Hmm.”

“What about you?”

“Black-eyed peas.” He pauses. “With my mother.”

Reece has never heard anything about Adam’s mother, except for the fact of her absence.

“Before she died. I was born in New Orleans, you know. If you think this is hot, it’s nothing like New Orleans in July. We were on the outskirts, and there were these farm kids that would drive up and down the neighborhood streets in a rusty old pickup, even in the trailer park where we were, and they’d sing out what they had. Fresh beans and corn,” Adam says the latter without an ‘r’, slipping momentarily into a drawl Reece has never heard from him before, “squash, and other vegetables. Fruit too. Watermelon. And peaches. God, the peaches. I lived for those. But Ma always bought black-eyed peas. When she started getting sick, she taught me how to cook them.”

“Cook them how?”

“Oh, nothing special. Celery, onions, garlic. Bacon if we had it. Or ham hocks.”

Reece doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing. Instead he rubs his palm in circles over Adam’s heart and kisses his shoulder.

“You ever been to New Orleans?”

“Nope,” Reece answers. Truth is, he’s not seen much of America at all.

“Someday I’m going to take you there.” Adam twists and kisses Reece softly. It feels like the seal of a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> I dearly hope this suits your Yuletide, Rivestra!
> 
> Fun fact: "as like as an apple to an oyster" is [apparently the 1670 version of "apples and oranges"](https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/apples+and+oysters), from John Ray's [A compleat collection of English proverbs](https://books.google.com/books?id=ofEIAAAAQAAJ&hl=en).
> 
> And relevant to the final scene is [this intro](https://open.spotify.com/track/4veQlFwCmQBqQcI0T2oCoq) to the song "No Love Today" by New Orleans-raised folk/blues musician Chris Smither.


End file.
